IT’S A Locke: : Lack of Morals and Ethics Aside, Once Bob Knight Is Your Friend, the Bond Never Breaks: Just Ask His New Assistant

Twenty-five years ago, two young pups took the floor, the one in his first head coaching job, the other in his first real assistant’s job. They had new whistles, ridiculously crisp shorts, the usual killing doubts of youth. They were young men who suspected they were in well over their heads.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” the assistant whispered to his boss. The boss, one year older and all of 23, was not much reassured by this confidence. He remembers thinking, “Great, we’re trying to tame a wild horse and neither of us knows how to ride.”

Twenty-five years later, different roads taken, but oddly intersecting after all this time: Bob Knight, grown equally tempestuous and self-righteous in his old age, that skeptical assistant from West Point, quietly hires Tates Locke, possibly the most dishonored and unemployable basketball coach of our time.

Telling vignette: His first day on the floor at Indiana, Locke pauses, shocked by those same old doubts, the shame of his awful history welling up. “What am I doing here?” he says. “Relax,” Knight whispers to his old boss, and moves on.

Because Locke has rejoined Knight, this time at Indiana, this time their roles reversed, there has been little additional discussion of matters other than basketball. “Relax” is the extent of Knight’s reckoning of his old friend’s awful history or even Locke’s tentative hold on the present. A man who is famous for his contempt of mediocrity, basketball and ethical, Knight has somehow forgiven a quarter century to silently accommodate an old friend and his personal redemption.

Whatever happened at Clemson, where Locke mysteriously ran amok and created a flagrantly and sometimes hilariously corrupt program, is now unspoken. Whatever happened afterward, when Locke’s professional ruin became a personal disaster as well--the drinking, pills, the “Jacksonville co-ed”--remains unmentioned. “We talk basketball,” says Locke gratefully. “Eighteen hours a day.”

In truth, Bob Knight and anybody is already an odd couple. Knight would be famous without his national championships, if only for his occasional tantrum and his fevered declamations of cheating and other abuses in amateur sports. It is believed that he disdains the annual Big Ten coaches’ meeting simply because he holds one of his colleague’s methods in low regard. So Knight and Locke, the National Collegiate Athletic Assn.’s worst nightmare in the early 70s? How do you explain that?

You do know who Tates Locke is, right? The NCAA closed down his Clemson program in 1975, placing the team on three years’ probation. The action was uncontested, and Locke himself, trying to unravel a knot in his stomach, even wrote a book about his four years there, admitting and detailing the abuses.

The NCAA has uncovered violations since and levied sanctions against other coaches, but Locke’s conflagration remains one of the more memorable, if only because he invited so many to watch. For whatever reason, Locke has become somewhat synonymous with the term outlaw coach. Neither a stint in the National Basketball Assn. nor a three-year period at Jacksonville University, where he presumably ran a clean program, has been redemptive enough. He has been virtually untouchable.

This seems too bad. By all accounts, his two highly successful seasons at West Point, four more good years at Miami (of Ohio) University were conducted under Knight-like propriety. But then Clemson.

Well, maybe anybody would have tripped up at Clemson. Knight had told him not to go there in the first place. “Ah,” recalls Locke, “the coach’s ego.” Locke thought he could win in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Actually, the first year he thought he could win clean. Until he had gone 9-17, it didn’t occur to him to play any other way.

Here’s how it works. It becomes convenient to tinker with a recruit’s transcript. Then it became necessary to help a recruit’s family. Fishing trips were arranged to isolate families and remove them from the recruiting pool. Cars were obtained by alumni, the coach simply hinting that they ought to “place a program” on a certain 6-foot 10-inch player. It got dirty and, at times, faintly ridiculous. To lure promising black players, some Clemson folks created hope of social growth by inventing a phony black fraternity. There would be a roundup of some black kids and the recruit would get a glimpse of them sipping soft drinks in a Quonset hut somewhere. “A joke,” Locke agrees.

One must imagine Knight’s disappointment. “All this had to tear Bobby up,” says someone who is a friend to both. “It had almost been like they were brothers. Here’s Tates getting in trouble, letting his personal life go to hell, writing a book . . . “

Knight regards book writers with the same disdain as cheaters, and here was his best friend committing both heinous crimes. Locke guessed he wasn’t going to get any congratulatory notes.

“Still,” Locke remembers, “all he ever said was, ‘How did you ever let this happen.’ I said, ‘Coach, I don’t know.”’

Perhaps only another, less judgmental coach can sympathize. Jerry Tarkanian, who once tried to help Locke out with a part-time job at Nevada Las Vegas, says, “He just got caught up in it at Clemson. Realistically, Clemson is not going to beat North Carolina or Virginia. Then, after you get beat for a while . . . everybody makes mistakes.”

Locke had made a whopper. It’s hard for him to take full responsibility for it, even to this day.

“I shouldn’t have gone south of the Mason-Dixon line,” he says, alluding to his difficulty in attracting good black players by ordinary means. As if that were his only problem. Perhaps he is thinking of the road not taken. Knight waited for an Indiana job, where the talent pool was enormous and easily recruited. The first year Locke was out of basketball, 1976, Knight was going 32-0.

Whatever went wrong had gone bad wrong. Locke was drinking too much by his own account, draughts of Scotch and milk, squiring more women than his marriage would allow. He believes his downfall at Jacksonville was partly caused by his alliance with a Jacksonville graduate during a separation from his wife. He thought he could try making things right, if only for himself, by writing a semi-tell-all book, “Caught in the Net.” He did that against Knight’s advice, too. But that went wrong, too.

“The book didn’t do any good,” says Locke of his 1982 effort. “It just made it worse. I thought it would help other coaches, but it didn’t help anybody. It just confirmed rumors and gave athletic directors reasons not to hire me. I just buried myself. Nobody wanted to hear it.”

Locke was mostly hoping for another chance in basketball. Tarkanian, realizing that basically Locke “is a high-class person, and a major-college winner,” took him on part time in 1982. “I like to give guys like that a chance,” says Tarkanian, “although (laughing) it’s not as easy for me as for somebody like Bobby.”

But Locke couldn’t live on a part-time salary and it became clear to him that there wouldn’t be a full-time salary anytime soon. He returned to exile in Jacksonville, where he had been reconciled with his wife.

And it was an exile, a two-way exile in fact. Locke took a job with Mizuno and traveled the Pro Golfers Assn. Tour with three Japanese craftsmen, repairing clubs, what have you. He did that for four years and then returned to Jacksonville and sold yogurt to industrial accounts. He was making a good living and playing a lot of golf.

“I got my handicap down to zero,” he says. Then laughing at his unspoken ambition: “Everybody thinks they can play the tour, don’t they.”

All this time Locke avoided basketball, although he felt finally prepared. “My life style had been way out of sync, drinking too much . . . I knew it would take time but . . . six years?” Occasionally he’d watch Indiana or some other team that favored his style of highly structured defense. But he found no joy in watching or remembering it. “I had no interest in it. Remember, I was living in Florida, competing in golf. You can live without basketball in Florida, you know.”

Of course, Locke wasn’t really living without basketball. For being an outlaw coach, he wasn’t much of an outlaw; he was never without the guilt, the idea of a game, a trust betrayed.

“I thought I could clean my guts out with that book, with time, but my guts never got cleaned out. I thought I would get rid of the hurt, for having done the things I had. I thought I’d be able to live with that. But it stayed in my stomach. I woke up nights, not every night but enough of them, and it just seemed to be there in my stomach.”

And then 25 years to the day when those two pups first walked out onto the floor, Knight called his old boss, wondering if he’d be interested in an assistant’s job. Locke said, “But what can I do? I’ve been out of it, the game’s changed. What can I contribute?” Knight said to come up for a couple of days. Locke did, returned to Jacksonville in a 24-hour period to get fresh clothes, and hasn’t been home since.

“I fell in love with the floor,” he says, remembering the exhilaration when they both walked out together, kids to teach, games to be played.

These things aren’t done and, apparently, aren’t spoken about when they are. Knight can be a Sphinx. Locke, at least, understands this as an act of extreme loyalty--”a big-time move on his part.”

There is this about Knight, though. Says a friend of both coaches: “Bobby would never turn his back on somebody. He’s loyal to the point of a fault. He might not forgive somebody for a long time, but I don’t think he’d ever turn his back on somebody. Bobby probably feels Tates has paid his debt. He’s been out of coaching, had marital and job problems--enough is enough. He’s paid his penalty, time to get on with his life. Let me tell you, if you have Robert Montgomery Knight for a friend, you don’t need a hell of a lot more.”

Whatever happens, the association goes a long way toward rehabilitating Locke’s career, intention or not.

Locke now becomes palatable to athletic directors, sanitized by Knight, returned to the whole and healthy. Was that the idea? What about intent? Loyalty? Friendship? Professional lookout? The prodigal son returning home? What is the meaning of all this? Locke laughs. “We never talk about it,” he says. “All I know is, I’ve never been happier.”